Cultural analysis in 60 minutes or less

Tag Archives: blogs

Last week, the blogger Cookaholic Wife sent me this Versatile Blogger Award!

According to the Pay it Forward-slash-chain letter explanation, The Versatile Blogger award “is a great way to introduce different bloggers to each other and to promote quality blogs that awardees and their readers may not have discovered otherwise.”

The rules of this award include
1. Thanking the person who gave you this award.
2. Include a link to their blog.
3. Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly.
4. Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award.
5. Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.
6. In the same post, include this set of rules.
7. Inform each nominated blogger of their nomination by posting a comment on each of their blogs.

And here are 7 Things About Me:
1. I hate multitasking when it comes to writing or work. I like to start one thing and finish it, or alternate between two tasks, preferably tasks that I would probably procrastinate, like grading papers and doing dishes. This way, when I switch, it feels like a break. Then I switch back after a while and it feels like another break.

2. Yet I love multitasking at leisure, like watching a movie and eating ice cream—only and always Ben and Jerry’s—at the same time, while I’m reading a book or magazine and holding, and occasionally playing, the guitar on my lap.

3. For most of my formative years—say, 13-21—I had no idea that I would be anything other than a rock star when I grew up; the guitar has been on my lap for decades. Yet I’m totally OK with not becoming famous now, because if I had become famous when I wanted to, at 20ish, I probably wouldn’t still be a famous rock star now anyway, and I wouldn’t have gone to grad school or met my lovely wife during that time because I would have been too busy being a famous rock star. So everything worked out.

4. It’s funny how often people say “Everything worked out” when, technically, it didn’t.

5. Similarly, most people say that things work out for a reason, according to plan, or according to fate, or destiny, or karma, yet they also believe that they themselves have free will. If pressed, I’d say that I prefer not to believe in any kind of fate but that I’d rather not have to decide.

6. Of course, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. But that’s not really a fact about me. That’s a fact about Neal Peart.

7. I have, unfortunately, been multitasking while writing this quasi-blog entry. I hate multitasking when it comes to writing or work.

Newly discovered fact: it turns out that I’m congenitally incapable of writing 7 Things About Me in any remotely sensible manner.